So Say We All
by Rap541
Summary: I intend to show the perspectives of several of the characters after the big speech of Adama's at the end. I was a huge Galactica fan as a kid and while my fanfic has wandered into many different genres, this is something of a return to my roots
1. Tighe

" So Say We All"  
  
The bottle beckoned him. He wanted the drink, wanted it so badly that he could already taste the harsh blend in his mouth. It was nearly full, and while dropping it in the waste basket was a grand gesture, he could think of numerous other bottles that were secreted all around the small cabin. He was a drunk, Kara Thrace was right about that, and truth be known, she was probably right about him being a bastard.  
  
And he wanted that drink.  
  
Did Husker really know the path to go on? Tighe doubted it. Oh, if everyone in high command was like William Adama, then he would have found it totally believable. Husker was duty bound and had been, ever since flight school, and he would have kept the secret. Tighe just didn't trust the load of buffoons that had made up the rest of high command to keep the coordinates of a mythical planet to themselves. That just wasn't very likely.  
  
He picked up the bottle again, and sat down on his small bunk. Was there some mythical planet, the Earth of legend? Did anyone know where it was? Did he really want a drink? Did he need it?  
  
He needed it badly, so badly his hands were shaking. The world was ending, and he wanted to be drunk. There was no Earth, no place to run and everything that ever mattered was gone. The President was a school teacher that never would have been elected in a real election. She was an appointee, a friend of the now dead President Adar, and while he couldn't complain about her, he had doubts about whether she would be able to hold the civilian fleet together without giving them hope. Even a false hope, like finding Earth.  
  
The people had been caught up in the moment at the ceremony. Most of them didn't even understand what was being proposed. A trek across the galaxy, looking for a needle in a haystack. The very idea made him want to drink Really, was there ever a more ridiculous situation that demanded drinking? They were running for their lives, billions of people had died within the last 36 hours, they had gone from being the crew of a ship about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum to being the protectors of the last remnant of humanity. It was enough to make a sober man drink, and he wasn't a sober man by nature.  
  
The commander had blind sided them with hope. It was masterful, really. He had stood in formation with the rest, chanting the relevant parts of the prayer, and he had felt it. It had rolled over the crowd, far more overpowering than the sickly stinging scent of disinfectant and the underlying odor of decay it had been trying to cover. In that moment, they had believed. Hell, he had believed.  
  
But once the warm afterglow had worn off, and it wore off very quickly when you were the XO who had ordered the action that had caused most of the shipboard deaths, he had time to think. Granted, he was a piker in comparison to the Cylons, but the flight deck was never going to see him as anything but a monster.  
  
And while he was absolutely certain that he had made the right decision, the only decision that would have saved the ship, he wasn't sure that he was ever going to be welcome down in crew quarters again. Not that it was easy to be the second in command and still casually hang out. It was probably for the best that he didn't feel comfortable about going down to the officers club and having a drink. Not with what he was thinking.  
  
Bill had lied. Tighe had known the man since their first day at the academy. It was a lie, a grand, inspired lie, worthy of a master. But. it was a lie, and that meant that within the next few months, they were probably going to be strafed by Cylon nukes.  
  
And that made him want that drink. He had wanted it all day. Really, considering how the day had gone, he would have been delighted if he could have just had the stuff injected directly into his veins. The hang over would be worth it. He deserved a drink, really.  
  
If he was having second thoughts about the commander's plan, then it had to be assumed that some of the crew were thinking the same thing. Some of the civilians too, and they couldn't be ordered to shut up. That was going to be a problem, a problem of no small proportion. The commander was going to need a lot of support. Better support than the words of a drunk.  
  
Tighe picked up the bottle out of the wastebasket and set it carefully into a cabinet. Throwing it out was a foolish extravagance. At the very least he could donate it to the flight deck. Give them something to curse his name with. 


	2. Lee

So Say We All  
  
Earth. Of all things, Earth the lost colony. It was a story, a children's story really. It wasn't even a popular children's story. He could count on one hand the number of times his mother had told him the tale. Even as a child, it had struck him as unlikely, right up there with the stories of the creepy Cylon that wouldn't stop until it had killed its nemesis.  
  
Lee Adama leaned back in his chair and glanced at the walls of his small room. As CAG, he had private quarters and while he doubted it would last for very long, a part of him was grateful. He didn't know the pilots on the Galactica for the most part. Kara was a friend from childhood and he knew Sharon and a few others from the Academy, but most of them were strangers. Angry strangers who had seen most of their friends and the previous CAG die less than thirty six hours earlier only to have another stranger (and the commander's son no less) be put in charge of him. In some ways it was a pity that Kara didn't have the rank. They would accept her. She had been Ripper's friend and passing the squadron from Ripper to Starbuck would have felt right.  
  
He had met Ripper only briefly, at the briefing before the attack. That made it hard to sit in the man's quarters, and stare at the pictures of people Lee didn't know. Ripper... Lee stopped himself. Did he even know Ripper's real name? The man in the photos hanging on the walls had a woman, and a few kids. And now they were all dead, Lee had been given his room, and didn't even know the man's real name. He sighed.  
  
It was the same story every where, of course. He wasn't the only one assigned to quarters filled with the possessions of now dead soldiers. He was luckier than most of the refugees, now that he thought about it. Sure, he had only come to the Galactica wearing one field uniform and carrying his dress blues, but that was one more set of clothes than many of them had. Most everyone he knew had lost every single member of their family and all of their friends besides. He was, through luck and the assignment of a chore he had loathed, surrounded by old friends. His father was there.  
  
And yet he felt alone.  
  
Being the senior pilot drew a line between the others and him. On his old ship, the battlestar Triton, the CAG had been a remote figure, by her own choice but also because the junior pilots cut her out of the circle. It was made worse on the Galactica because of who he was and who his father was. It was obnoxious the way everyone had smarmed up to him. It was like the entire ship was in love with his father.  
  
And the old man loved them back. It showed in every interaction. Had it just been himself, William Adama would have taken every single gun on board and gone running to the enemy firing. It had been their lives that the commander had worried about. And his... and wasn't that a surprise?  
  
He wasn't sure he deserved it. He wasn't sure he deserved to be CAG. He wasn't even really certain he deserved to be alive. So many were dead. So many had made impossible choices. Helo had given up his life to save someone he considered more worthy. Starbuck had nearly been killed saving his life. Poor Ripper had gone into the fight and been shot down like a sick dog.  
  
And there was Zac of course. Zac who died in a stupid training accident two years earlier. Unbidden, his father's words from the ceremony came to him. Were the dead the lucky ones? Had the training accident not happened.... The odds were against Zac surviving. The only pilots who had survived the initial attack were the ones who had been in the older ships. Zac would have been in the initial wave and that meant Zac would still be dead. Or take it a step further, he thought suddenly. What if Zac hadn't gone to the Fleet Academy, but instead attended art school the way he had talked when they were little? He would have been planet side when the attack came. And he would still be dead, and that wasn't very lucky at all.  
  
Zac had always liked the story about the lost colony. But then, Zac had always been the one to have flights of fancy. He could take a simple little story and turn it into an epic. Lee had never understood where that creativity had come from. Neither of his parents were particularly creative. The traits he most associated with his father were stern discipline and perhaps some dry wit on rare occasions. His mother, a gentle caring person, was, he could admit, not someone that easily handled her children's demands for stories and entertainment. Zac, however, had always been fascinated with stories and there had been a time where it seemed like all the younger boy did was read over the old legends. It had driven Lee crazy even though both of his parents had indulged it as a phase.  
  
He looked at the pictures on the wall again. Ripper had a pretty wife, and three children, two boys and a girl. It had only been thirty six hours. He wondered if the wife and kids were huddled somewhere on their homeworld wondering if their father was going to come and rescue him. When he and Zac would go off wandering as kids and get lost, it was always their father who went tramping through the woods, calling for them. First there would be hugs, always. There was never anything particularly scary about being in the woods but when darkness fell, there was nothing more comforting than that hug, even though it was always followed by gruff words about responsibility. Such admonitions always flew over Zac, and within minutes he would clamoring for a piggy back ride that he usually got and a story. Despite himself, Lee smiled. He didn't much like the old man and he doubted that they would ever get past their differences, but he had been given a near idyllic childhood. He closed his eyes and thought back to one of the last times he remembered walking in the woods with his father. Zac was chattering over some new book of myths he had read, and Lee could almost feel his father's hand on his shoulder. It had been a long time since he had felt so safe.  
  
The chair rocked forward. Myth or real, Earth was a long way away. He had work to do, and quarters to clean. His feet touched something under the desk and when he knelt down to look, he found a pair of soft shoes. It was a piece of Ripper's humanity that he wasn't sure he wanted to see. The deck floors were hard and Ripper hadn't been a young man. Not that hurting feet were a sign of age. His own feet were throbbing from too much walking on hard deck floors in dress uniform. He eyed the shoes and then matched them up against his feet. Another wry smile crossed his face. At least he filled Ripper's shoes in one way. 


	3. Tyrol

" So Say We All "  
  
It wasn't like the ship could exist without the flight crews. It wasn't like it was easier to train someone to all the functions of the flight deck. Sure it technically took longer to train a viper pilot and bridge officers had to have more technical course work beyond the initial officer training, but it took close to that amount of time to turn a raw rook fresh from Basic into a skilled technician. Longer, truth be told, if you wanted that skilled technician to work in a cohesive team.  
  
Tyrol sighed as he looked down the roster. There were a lot of spaces to fill, too many. And the ones remaining.... It was easy for people to say that no one was a rook after the last two days, and while he understood the mentality and agreed with the philosophy behind the statement, it didn't change the fact that his crews were mostly empty and the ones who remained were not experts. The Galactica had, in the past few years, been more of a training ship and proving ground than a real fighting ship. If you could work on the Galactica, where there were no integrated computers, then you could work anywhere. It was a mark of honor, even among the pilots, to say that your first posting was on the Galactica. It was true, too. By its very design, it was harder to work on the Galactica. The commander made it more difficult by never backing down on the issue. On the one hand, Commander Adama's refusal to have any integrated computer systems on board the ship had probably saved their lives. On the other hand, it certainly had dragged the old man down in the fleet standings. He wondered if the commander felt vindicated at all.  
  
Not that it could be much comfort, Tyrol supposed after a moment of thought. Being right was all fine and good, but when being right meant that almost every single person in the colonies died.... No, he doubted that Commander Adama drew much comfort from being right.  
  
As for himself... Tyrol didn't know what to think or how to feel. He didn't have a family beyond the people on the ship and he hadn't been looking forward to the next few months after the decommissioning. There was something about gutting a war ship and turning it into a tourist attraction that tore him up. He had intentionally kept away from the conversion of the starboard landing bay into a museum because he couldn't bear to see it happening. Now though, there was a part of him, a very small part to be sure, that was going to delight in ripping out the damn gift shop from the viper launch tubes.  
  
The problem was that there were a lot of members of his family that weren't going to be there. Eighty three people didn't seem like a lot, not when you put them up against the billions upon billions that had died, but the next time he called for a formation on the deck, there were going to be a lot fewer faces. And it wasn't just the rooks who had died. Prosna had been the first friend he had made in Basic. And now the man was dead because the colonel wouldn't spare one minute before blowing the deck.  
  
He would have to think about promoting some of the remaining people, he realized. Most of them weren't ready but he couldn't do it all by himself. There would also have to be a recruiting drive in the rest of the ships in the convoy. There were fifty thousand people give or take out there and there had to be a few with military service.  
  
And a lot of the work wasn't going to be skilled labor, not at first. The destruction of the gift ship and museum was going to take a serious amount of raw labor. Repairing the port landing bay and getting the remaining vipers working would take more time, especially as short handed as they were. Cally had done the initial survey and even if he pulled all of his people and just worked on the port landing bay, it would take weeks. And he couldn't pull everyone for just one task. The commander wanted the refit of the starboard landing bay started and while there had been no time limit given, he was pretty sure that there was an expectation that it would be done quickly. Then there were all of the civilian ships that desperately needed engineering assistance. And after that? There would need replacement vipers and raptors, there were a few civilian ships that could be converted to fighting ships. That would also mean building some new ships to hold the displaced civilians and they were already packed too tightly on any number of ships to begin with. For health reasons alone, more ships would need to be built. He grinned ruefully. In five minutes he had come up with enough work to fill several lifetimes.  
  
The commander had approved pulling every able bodied person on board off regular duty and having them work on the landing bays. It would help but it was a lot of people to manage that weren't trained. The pilots were willing to work on their ships, for the most part, but in the past they tended to balk at doing more mundane tasks like clean up work or heavy lifting. They were a just a bunch of arrogant fancy fliers for the most part, he thought with some contempt, that had no idea how much actual raw work it took to put their ships in the sky...  
  
He stopped himself before he went further down that train of thought. There was a place for that particular resentment and it was in the past. All of the pilots, and almost everyone else on board the ship including the few refugees that had been picked up had been down helping haul away debris. And there were precious few pilots left. It would be unlikely to find any ex viper or raptor pilots in the convoy.  
  
Sharon would know more about it than he would. Sharon was, as near as anyone could tell, the only qualified raptor pilot left. Suddenly, he wanted to see her, to hold her. In one respect, he was much luckier than everyone else. Sharon had survived and he had survived and the issue of fraternization seemed very very minor now. They were on a trip to a place that no one had been in known history, and most of humanity had died, and there were a million things to do but he wanted to be with his girlfriend. And for once, he was going to go with his heart. Earth, and all the things they had to do to get to Earth, could wait one shift. 


	4. Dualla

"So Say We All"  
  
Billions were dead. Billions had died in a matter of minutes. It was entirely possible that every single human being other than the few that were in the ships floating around were dead. It was too large a number to think about, Dualla thought as she crunched more navigation numbers at her console. She couldn't imagine a billion people, let alone a billion dead people.  
  
" Specialist Dualla, you should get some rest," a heavy voice chimed from nearby. Who it was, the commander, Col. Tighe, maybe Gaeta... She didn't know. She didn't care either. Her eyes felt like someone had blasted grit into them and she had been on her feet in the CIC since the crisis began.  
  
Crisis, she thought as she made her way to the deck corridor, it was not the right word for billions of dead people. Someone would find a phrase, she was sure of that, but who, that was the question. It was unlikely that the chaos of escape had spared any poets.  
  
Dualla stopped in her tracks. She turned, and half trotted, half ran down the hall, barely able to mutter excuses as she pushed by the tired crew people who were going about their business. Finally, she ended up in crew quarters, in one of the few recreation areas that didn't get a lot of use. It was an anachronism, a waste of space even on the Galactica. Technology had passed the room by, and the few people who visited it knew that it only existed because the Galactica was due for decommissioning and renovating was more costly than just retiring.  
  
But she liked having a library on board. Reading off a hand held pad hurt her eyes and it felt like work. Holding a book, curling up in a comfortable chair and reading, perhaps with the gentle pitter pat of rain falling on the roof, that was how a book was supposed to be read. There was no charm in looking up a book in a computer catalog. The best books, the best stories, were found in dusty racked shelves lit only by the sun streaming through glass that was so old, waves and impurities could be seen. The Galactica's library was certainly not in that league but she had found many good friends in the small collection of books.  
  
A billion people was unimaginable, but looking at the small dusty room loaded to the ceiling with what were probably the only books in the entire ship, if not the entire fleet, Dualla felt her heart break. She almost immediately felt a wave of guilt. The people were more important, of course they were more important than books,... but there would be no more books for a very long time. Not until they reached Earth. If they reached Earth.  
  
She walked over the shelves. None of the books that had inspired her to join the military were in the library. The wild tales of space adventure and aliens that had empires were for children and had no place in a library for adults. That held true for the ship's computer storage as well. If one of the other ships didn't have a good collection, it was possible that all of the literature she had grown up with was gone. " Hey...." She jumped at the sound, and turned. It was Billy, and he was standing in the doorway of the library, his face concerned. " I saw you.... I called but you didn't seem to hear me...." He looked nervous. She almost smiled. He reminded her of almost every young boy she had known in school. However, it wasn't enough to stop her bad mood. While Billy looked young enough to still be in school, she knew he was an aide to the Minister of Education, now the President of the Council, and that wasn't a position that was given to a boy, even now. And she wasn't ready to speak of what she had been thinking.  
  
" I just wanted to be alone, " she said harshly.  
  
He nodded but he didn't leave. Instead he walked into the small room and looked around. " I didn't know the ship had a library."  
  
"It's not much of one, " Dualla said after a moment, " But I guess we won't have much need for poetry and stories for a while." The bitter tone couldn't be taken from her voice. She didn't care.  
  
Much to her surprise, Billy shook his head. " You don't believe that. "  
  
" No, " she said after a moment, " but its so little compared to what was lost. And you and I both know that its hardly a priority. Lives are more important."  
  
He went to one of the shelves and picked out a book. " I think I read this in school. I know the computers on Colonial One have a good selection too. Its not all lost. And there will be more."  
  
" Written by who?" She shouted that, not caring that he recoiled. " The people that were saved... what are the odds that any of them are writers? Or artists? Or musicians? Who do you think is going to take over from the artists we lost? Who is going to write the stories?"  
  
" Maybe it'll be you." He set the book down and looked at her, his eyes twinkling. " You look shocked."  
  
" I just....never thought of it that way." She hadn't, and his words opened an entirely new vista of thought.  
  
He shrugged. " I never thought I would be the right hand man of the president. People are going to have to take on new jobs. If there are no artists, no writers, no musicians, people will step up. Why shouldn't one of them be you?" The announcement system blared overhead and he stepped to the door. " That's my shuttle. I have to go back to the president's ship."  
  
She put her hand on his shoulder. Suddenly she wanted to be with someone, to be with Billy. She drew him in to her and kissed him. " You can catch the next shuttle." 


End file.
